Well, ya goofs, it’s that time of year again. Yes, of course, to lustily disagree with the very plainly marked-as-personal personal opinions of Team while eschewing participation in the very publicly advertised Fan Choice portion of the annual Homicidols Best Of, and also to tell us what the heck you think should be nominees.

This is Kerrie’s bag now, but she made the frightful mistake of asking me to write up this intro post, so … well, she has a design for this process and goodness knows that Team has been working with her on selecting our favorites in each category for a little while, but even for all of that there’s a better than negative chance that I’ll somehow screw this up, Kerrie will have to correct that while admonishing me publicly, and nobody’s favorite anything will actually win. Exciting? You bet.

The way this’ll work: Kerrie made a nomination form. It is linked below. Please read through all of this stuff before running to it and then getting mad at us for missing some detail. But this form: It is for nominations, not votes for winners; we’ll do that in a little bit yet. So because it’s for nominations, yes, you can submit a couple of forms if you think, for instance, that a particularly prolific personal yoshi of yours deserves to have two singles nominated. Just try to be realistic about it, you know? Don’t spam for the sake of it and make us go through multiple rounds of cut-downs just to get to a final Best Of ballot of reasonable length.

Anyway! In addition to the usual and in the same spirit as trying to make the awards a little more fun like we did last year, we’re introducing a few new categories this time around:

• Best Reboot: You know how groups will break up or go on semi-permanent hiatus, and then suddenly they’re back with new members and/or a slight rebrand? That happens enough anymore that we decided to make an award for all of those let’s-try-it-again manager-sans.
• Saddest Disbandment: Because this was an absolutely savage year for idols doing into that good night, we split up the heartbreak into graduations (that is, when individuals leave their groups for whatever reason, including en masse) and disbandments (when the group goes up in smoke). This is the latter.
• Saddest Graduation: See above. And what’s even nastier is that neither of these in any way replace Letdown of the Year!
• Funniest Moment: Obviously very open to interpretation, but what happened in idol this year that made you literally laugh out loud or shake your damn head or roll on the floor laughing your ass off?

These submissions, these reader submissions, are open from today (Nov. 20) to Nov. 27 (that’s a week!), at which point Kerrie will tally up the responses, find the things in common, merge that with the internal voting we’ve done and try to come up with a final-final ballot, but in reality we’ll probably have to do one full round of cutting-down first, if history is any indication. And then everyone will vote and we’ll publish the results and butts will be hurt and then we’ll also publish the Team results and do some individual rundowns as well and absolutely nobody will be happy. Can’t wait!

Here’s the submission form! Oh and remember: “2019” means “actually December 2018 through November 2019 because we like to publish this inside the calendar year”.